I currently use a very old Xenarc CarPC with an old Sound Blaster Audigy 2Z PCMCIA sound card. I'm thinking about replacing this unit and was wondering if the audio drivers from Realtek contained on the newer motherboards offer bit perfect/bit accurate audio? The one I'm looking at is this one:

I used an Objective USB DAC ($100) on my first carPC, then I used the Hifimediy Saber USB DAC ($50) on my second, to feed my MS-8. Both use the ESS Sabre ES9023 DAC chip with 112db DNR, and provide 2V RMS stereo line output to feed your DSP.

They do sound better than onboard sound, especially if you are feeding a DSP.

11-08-2013, 11:04 PM

isamu

Quote:

Originally Posted by rray

I used an Objective USB DAC ($100) on my first carPC, then I used the Hifimediy Saber USB DAC ($50) on my second, to feed my MS-8. Both use the ESS Sabre ES9023 DAC chip with 112db DNR, and provide 2V RMS stereo line output to feed your DSP.

Thanks. But does on-board sound vs external DAC really matter when you use bit perfect?

The jitter will probably be much lower with the USB DAC, as bit perfect does nothing to assure good timing. What jitter does is cause the rebuilding of the sound waves into analog to not reproduce them exactly. Example would be a perfect triangle wave cut into a dozen time slices. Each slice of the original is a linear ramp up in amplitude for the first 6 slices, then down for the last 6 slices. Now upon rebuilding the wave, if jitter is high, instead of a triangle, your wave can look like a jagged mountain peak.

If they put a good quality sound on the motherboard then probably low jitter, but that costs money, so most motherboard audio has mediocre audio timing.

I feel it is important only because it makes the audio reproduction more accurate to the original source, instead of how my old cassette deck in the 1970's used to speed up and slow down as the tape transport binded and loosened while playing. We had disturbing jitter back in the day.

11-09-2013, 09:01 PM

redheadedrod

Personally if I didn't mind if my box was a little taller here is the one I would get... You are NOT going to find a better mini-ITX board out there at this time...

But then again it might not be great in a car that has lots of vibrations and might need a M4-ATX or similar power supply to run. MIGHT run with an M3-ATX but hard to say. If I didn't already have a board I might try this one but I know it won't fit in my M350 case.

Blows my Gigabyte motherboard out of the water. Designed for Haswell chips and comes with WiFi/BlueTooth and support for a SDD card (Whatever an M.2 socket is. Looks like a PCIe slot. ) Special add on sound card and supports top speed processors and DDR3 3000 ram...

That Maximus VI board is an awesome find! It has the best onboard audio I have seen used so far. I just read up on M.2 and it sounds like it's the fastest SSD port available, almost what you would expect SATA 4 to be, but even smaller than mSATA in current ultrabooks.

I better get one to play with!

11-10-2013, 04:30 PM

redheadedrod

I thought you would like that... ;) I saw it listed when I checked out my current motherboard. I have an older Maximus IV board and a Formula VI board. If you find out what the heck that M.2 port is I would be glad to hear more since this Formula board has one too. I have a couple mSata 32gig cards that look like they would plug in but I don't know if it is backwards compatible.

Let me know how it goes. Like I said, I think it will be a little tall but it has some seriously cool stuff. I probably won't miss it since I hope to use a DAC. I have a couple USB sound cards although one is a turtle beach I bought a long time ago and don't know if it will even work with newer OS.

The M.2 port if I am reading correctly can be used as a write through system. In otherwords it can work as a cache for the HD. Allowing a VERY fast bootup. If you get a big enough card you probably don't need a separate hard drive which makes it fit into a smaller box. Of course it can be used as your sole hard drive in the system. I have a 120gig SSD on my system but it is a 2.5" drive.

Rodney

11-10-2013, 04:37 PM

isamu

Quote:

Originally Posted by redheadedrod

Personally if I didn't mind if my box was a little taller here is the one I would get... You are NOT going to find a better mini-ITX board out there at this time...

But then again it might not be great in a car that has lots of vibrations and might need a M4-ATX or similar power supply to run. MIGHT run with an M3-ATX but hard to say. If I didn't already have a board I might try this one but I know it won't fit in my M350 case.

Blows my Gigabyte motherboard out of the water. Designed for Haswell chips and comes with WiFi/BlueTooth and support for a SDD card (Whatever an M.2 socket is. Looks like a PCIe slot. ) Special add on sound card and supports top speed processors and DDR3 3000 ram...

That is a very nice board. Are there any dealers that sell this in a fully assembled case?

11-16-2013, 07:57 AM

cmotors

I just bought the Maximus myself, and plan to install it this weekend. My old 775 board started developing an issue with an intermittent disconnect in the board, which is getting worse now that it is getting colder out. This Maximus board is so sweet. Have always wanted to have a discrete audio card in the car. Up to now I've been using an old creative usb sound card. I'm going to be running it with an M2-ATX and an i3 4130. Only 3 audio ports on the card which should be fine if the port allocation feature works as expected. This board doesn't have a VGA port, so I have to buy a 30 - 40 dollar cable to go from hdmi to vga. The board actually isn't as tall as I expected. In fact, the tallest part of everything when put together is the stock fan that came with the cpu, and it's a fairly small fan. The power riser is only a few millimeters higher than the back i/o ports. Asus apparently put a lot of effort to stay within mini itx specs